Encyclopedia of the War of 1812. (Book Reviews).

Encyclopedia of the War of 1812. Edited by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. (Santa Barbara, Calif., and other cities: ABC-CLIO, c. 1997. Pp. xxxviii, 636. $95.00, ISBN 0-87436-968-1.)

Given the recent anniversaries of the U.S.-Mexican and Spanish-American Wars, the War of 1812 can now claim exclusive title as the least-known major conflict in our history. Despite the recent appearance of a number of good campaign narratives and a few works of more general significance, the origins of the war no longer receive the scholarly attention they did during the 1950s and 1960s, and the foci of research on the early republic have shifted to the 1790s and the years after 1815, leaving the years of the Jefferson and Madison administrations perhaps the least studied in American historiography today. The Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 will not change this, but those interested in the period will applaud the appearance of this volume, the first comprehensive reference work on the war, as a sign of renascent visibility and future potential.

As such this book is unique and invaluable. But it does have defects that limit its user-friendliness. Form is essential to the employment of content in reference works, hence most of my reservations. The articles are organized alphabetically (meaning that they are most easily used if you already know what you are looking for), and lists of related articles follow each entry, but the lists are not extensive, nor can they fully compensate for a wider variety of finding tools. Similarly, the maps are very extensive and well executed, but they are located in a cluster prior to the articles.

The articles concentrate on people and events in the years during and immediately preceding the war. This focus limits attention to the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the conflict and to general themes and historiography (although entries on the states and certain localities supply some of these desiderata), diminishing the likelihood that the encyclopedia will stimulate new attention from social and cultural historians. (There is no entry for religion, for example, despite the existence of a literature that has recently shown signs of rejuvenation.) The text is nicely illustrated with reproductions of paintings, drawings, and engravings, mostly portraits. The average length of the articles--about a double-columned page, or roughly a thousand words--is ample but varies rather widely. (Artillery receives eight pages but naval ordnance only two; and while the entries on Congress, diplomacy, antiwar sentiment, and American efforts to finance the war run about three pages apiece, there are no articles devoted to the U.S. or British armies and navies as institutions, despite a blurb about the U.S. Army on the dust jacket.) The contributors number more than seventy, including both recognized experts and junior researchers, and few of those one might expect to see have been omitted. They are, however, overwhelmingly Americans, and there are no entries on Parliament or British war finances to match those on Congress and American financing. In most cases the articles and contributors seem reasonably matched, and the entries in my primary fields of expertise are accurate and up to date. Each entry concludes with a bibliography of several works, which are usually appropriate.

The articles are followed by appendices that include tables listing the votes of congressmen on the declaration of war (both alphabetically and by state), a list of cabinet-level executive officers in the Madison administrations, and primary documents including British and French decrees on trade, the Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts and Macon's Bill No. 2, Madison's war message to Congress, and the Treaty of Ghent. These are followed by a chronology, glossary, bibliography, and index. Here the reader again faces some problems of organization and comprehensiveness. The chronology is broken down into political, military, and diplomatic columns, but there are no political entries between the Baltimore riots in 1812 and the Hartford Convention, and no diplomatic ones between the Russian offer of mediation in September 1812 and the beginning of formal peace negotiations in August 1814. The bibliography is a full twenty-five pages in length, but the entries are organized by alphabetical order alone, with no differentiation of primary and secondary sources or books, articles, and dissertations. There are also some surprising omissions, like William Skelton's An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1815 (Lawrence, Kans., 1992)--the primary work on the subject, though it does not cover the operations of the War of 1812 directly--while a number of the works included are of little general significance or focus on the Jacksonian era. The glossary is mostly of naval terms; the index is fifteen pages but consists largely of proper names. None of this will prevent the reader from gaining a treasure trove of valuable information. The Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 is the only resource of the kind to treat this conflict. It will serve and delight scholars for many years to come, and I am happy to have it on my shelf.